This Day in Media History (Beck, Palin Lead Pseudo-Event, ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally)

Aug. 28, 2010—In one of the more curious manifestations of the growing Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck (pictured) and Sarah Palin led a “Restoring Honor” rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial that attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees.

The event, audaciously held on the 47^th anniversary of the “March on Washington,” had little discernible content but demonstrated plenty of discontent—principally, with an African-American President whose election two years previously would have been inconceivable without the civil-rights movement that had reached its rhetorical zenith on this spot.

At the time, "Restoring Honor" garnered quite a bit of attention, typified by the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, which devoted three articles in one issue to the rally: William Kristol’s lead editorial, along with features by Harvard government Professor Harvey Mansfield and Lee Harris, author of The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite.

Searching the Internet for more recent retrospectives on the rally, though, I came up with nothing significant. You might wonder, then, why I am even writing about something that left so little discernible impact on the popular memory.

But I would argue that it is worth discussing—not only as a demonstration of the amorphous anger that coalesced into the Democratic Party’s midterm drubbing the following November, but also as an example of what the historian Daniel J. Boorstin had, in his 1961 book The Image, termed a “pseudo-event.”

That resentment and the movement’s penchant for such synthetic happenings were integral elements in both the Republican Party’s domination of Capitol Hill through much of this past decade as well as in the rise of Donald Trump and his continued popularity among Republicans.

But back to Beck.

Three years ago while on a tour bus in Savannah, I saw another passenger, a middle-aged man, blinking nonstop. I couldn’t think right away who he reminded me of. Then it hit me: this was a Glenn Beck look-alike. I groaned at even this low-grade, undoubtedly unconscious imitator.

Starting out as a radio personality, Beck made the leap to television at CNN’s Headline News. Eventually the libertarian commentator came to the attention of Roger Ailes, who was casting about for an additional ratings magnet besides Bill O’Reilly. After meeting with him, the Fox News head hired Beck.

Debuting the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, Beck was attracting more than 2 million viewers daily within a few weeks. Despite appearing in the 5 pm slot—not even the coveted prime time spot—Beck soon became the third highest-rated personality on the network.

 

He endeared himself to his audience with such pronouncements as that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people” and that Nazi tactics were progressive tactics.

Besides Beck, Fox had also had a hand in promoting Palin. From the moment of her selection as GOP Presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate, Ailes saw her as a natural for his medium with her biting criticism of both GOP regulars and liberal press outlets, or, in a term that has been endlessly and mindlessly retailed on social media ever since, “the lamestream media.”

With mounting legal bills from the election and her new-found celebrity status, Palin stepped down as governor in July 2009. Early the following year, she was on board as a Fox political commentator—as well as a star in the insurgent right wing whose endorsement could catalyze previously moribund candidates.

Although recognizing their ability to boost ratings, Ailes before long found Beck and Palin distinctly high maintenance. That feeling began to solidify with the “Restore Honor” rally, which—particularly in Beck’s case—the news head saw as an attempt at brand building outside the umbrella of the network, according to Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room.

In no small part, that explains why Fox made no special attempt to cover a happening by one of its own stars.

Ailes’ suspicions about Beck may have sprung from a conjunction of the rally itself, the anniversary of the civil-rights milestone, and his star’s own venture. Only a couple of days after “Restoring Honor” was held, Beck launched TheBlaze, a conservative cable media company. Indeed, it might be said that the venture arrived amid a “blaze” of publicity for its founder.

Whatever the rally’s shortcomings as actual news, it was certainly the kind of “pseudo-event” that Boorstin had in mind.  Using his criteria, it was planned rather than spontaneous; planned primarily to be reported or reproduced; ambiguous as it relates to the underlying situation; and intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even more obnoxiously, it sparked pseudo-events meant to counter it: on that very day by the Rev. Al Sharpton, and that fall in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”

But in another sense, "Restoring Honor" was not just a pseudo-event but also a daring act of political appropriation. More specifically, Beck and Palin capitalized on the inevitable association with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech without acknowledging the true nature of his challenge to the American political and social order of the time.

In a single sentence, Palin lumped King together with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as having “the same steel spine and moral courage” as the crowd.  Leave aside for a second the blatant flattery of those gathered together, not to mention the fatuity and fallaciousness of grouping them with a trio who risked death for establishing or extending freedom to Americans.

In essence, Palin was conveying that she knew that King was somehow important, but not why. The causes that drew her and Beck to the Tea Party—less government and lower taxes—were antithetical to the aims of Dr. King, who saw the federal government as the necessary guarantor of the rights of African-Americans and who in the weeks before his death was advocating for labor unions and the “Poor People’s Campaign” for jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and education for poor adults and children.

Does anyone really think that Beck and Palin would regard such measures collectively as anything other than socialism?

Certain aspects of the rally—all mentioned in the trio of Weekly Standard articles—gave it a veneer of non-partisanship: its stress on the non-objectionable “God and Country”; the ban on signs; the lack of specific references to political parties; even proceeds from the event to be designated for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.

But all of this contrasts with the lack of progressive speakers who could have balanced the more conservative Beck and Palin, not to mention the use of the “Restoring Honor” label itself, which Professor Mansfield bluntly admitted was “a jab at President Obama.”

In retrospect, the irony of that “jab” is glaring. 

Whatever his real shortcomings as a leader, President Obama has conducted his private life without the sexual scandals that plagued a predecessor (Bill Clinton) and the current occupant of the Oval Office, and his administration was largely free of the ethics violations that characterized administrations of both parties going back nearly 40 years. Beck and Palin would have been better advised to employ that "Restoring Honor" tag now for the individual seeking reelection rather than a decade ago.

The best way to illustrate the fundamental shortcoming of Restoring Honor, though, is to contrast it with the March on Washington. 

Religious conviction animated most of those on the official program (King, John Lewis, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz) as surely as those at “Restoring Honor,” but they were there to promote concrete objectives—passage of civil-rights measures, ending school segregation, enforcing the 14^th Amendment, and minimum-wage and fair-labor legislation.

On the other hand, “Restoring Honor” was centered around themes—God and Country. They were not only unassailable (were liberals really against either?), but also, for that reason, unmeasurable.

Beck, for instance, had proclaimed, "Something beyond imagination is happening. America today begins to turn back to God." How to begin to assess the truth of that? What constitutes turning “back to God”? Who decides what that even is?

In producing a return to God, Beck and Palin might have done better to dispense with smarmy self-congratulation like this in favor of painful self-examination. 

They might have asked how many people might have been turned off by the religious right's near-incestuous embrace of political power, or how so many leaders of religious-affiliated institutions had alienated their faithful through their own financial and/or sexual corruption (seen most recently with Jerry Falwell Jr. and, in the past few decades, with the American hierarchy of my faith, the Roman Catholic Church).

Quote of the Day (Maureen Dowd, on ‘Sarahcuda’ Palin)

“With [Sarah] Palin and [Donald] Trump, a failed reality star and a successful one, gall is divided into two parts. There has been a lot of talk this campaign season about how women pols bring superior qualities to the table: collegiality and listening skills. But Sarahcuda shows that we are truly the equals of men, capable of narcissistic explosions, brazen hypocrisy and unapologetic greed. She had barely finished the endorsement Tuesday when she began using it to raise money for SarahPAC, so she can take her show on the road.”—Maureen Dowd, “Sarah Palin Saves Feminism,” The New York Times, Jan. 24, 2016

Sarah Palin threatens to put out of business Saturday Night Live as a source of electoral satire. After all, how can the SNL parody of her Donald Trump endorsement compete with her own self-parody?

“Just what is it with Sarah Palin?” a relative of mine, by no means a liberal, asked me the other day. What, indeed? After listening to her speech supporting Trump, can you, Faithful Reader, recall another public figure who ever sounded so incoherent without being drunk or high?

Michael Barbaro’s New York Times piece about this landmark in political dissuasion could barely restrain itself in recounting the former Vice-Presidential candidate’s multiple offenses to sense and sensibility. He picked out 10 of the “most memorable lines” from the speech, then, kind soul that he is, translated it for the benefit of readers. This passage is a particular favorite of mine:

“And you quit footing the bill for these nations who are oil-rich, we’re paying for some of their squirmishes that have been going on for centuries. Where they’re fighting each other and yelling ‘Allahu akbar,’ calling jihad on each other’s heads forever and ever. Like I’ve said before, let them duke it out and let Allah sort it out.”

It’s hard to know where to start with something like this. Already, “squirmishes,” in all its artlessness, shows signs of becoming a permanent part of political slang. (If Palin had a working cerebellum at this point, she might be squirming at the thought that she butchered a common-enough word like “skirmishes.”)

There once was a time, from one end of our sprawling country to another, when teachers instilled in their students how to build, step by step—words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, all held together by consistency in pronouns, verbs and tone—structures of larger thought. That has gone sadly missing in the three sentences—or what purport to be three sentences—in Ms. Palin’s quote above. 

It is extremely doubtful whether any professional speechwriter would ever want to be credited with having written this grammatically loose, meandering address. The logical conclusion is that Ms. Palin herself winged it, right on the stump. No self-respecting politician improvises in this fashion, lest he or she risk merciless exposure, as Ms. Palin did in this case.

It is, in fact, a dreadful commentary on modern audiences that a speech like this elicited resounding cheers rather than appalled silence. Within my own memory, politicians once delivered coherent addresses. They might be cliché-ridden, they might be even masterfully evasive, but they attempted to present arguments and convince audiences of their value.

What “Sarahcuda” presented last week did not even meet this minimum standard. In fact, it doesn’t even match the level of the 30-second soundbite so derided by so many contemporary political commentators.

But leave aside questions of sound and sense. A woman whose principal national-security expertise derived from seeing Russia from her Alaska home executed, in the sphere of foreign policy, a triple-axel that would have astounded Olympic skaters.

Consider this: In September 2008, then-Governor Palin told a church audience that the “Iraq War is a task that is from God.” More than seven years later, she sounded like Sen. Rand Paul in demanding that the U.S. stop “footing the bill for these nations who are oil-rich.” In the interval between these statements, she never explained her reversal.

Nearly a decade ago, she did not criticize the President who put these soldiers in harm’s way, in a conflict started on faulty premises and pursued without forethought: George W. Bush. Now, shockingly, she blames Barack Obama—who has consistently sought to wind down the disastrous conflict inherited from his predecessor—for the post-traumatic stress disorder she sees at the heart of her son Track’s recent act of domestic violence that led to his arrest.

In that accusation against the President, Palin not only demonstrated that she fails at English and history, but also at logic. Track Palin’s tour of duty in Iraq began in 2008, before Barack Obama became President.  

As for the idea that Obama is “indifferent” to veterans such as Track: The long wait times for veterans' care that burst into public view last year were, according to this article from Mother Jones, known as far  back as 2005, but continued for the remaining four years of the Bush administration. Yet, even as veterans’ problems began to pile high in the second term of George W. Bush, the administration stuck to its plans to cut funding for their  health care, according to this 2007 piece from the Washington Times.

In 2008, Sarah Palin proved to be scandalously uninformed and unprepared to assume the Presidency. The nation dodged a budget when she and the man who named her to the ticket, John McCain, did not win the election. This year, however, reveals a scandal of a different kind: the continuing adulation she still receives from an oblivious portion of the American public. In 1997, William Kristol and David  Brooks wrote an essay in The Weekly Standard calling for "National Greatness Conservatism." Nearly two decades later, Sarah Palin can lay fair claim to leading another, increasingly more sizable, wing of the movement: Clueless Conservatism.

Quote of the Day (Ted Cruz, on Sarah Palin)

“I would not be in the U.S. Senate today if it were not for Governor Palin."—U.S. Senator from Texas Ted Cruz, introducing Sarah Palin at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference, quoted in “Ted Cruz at CPAC: I Would Not Be in Senate Without Sarah Palin,” breitbart.com, March 16, 2013

Thanks for sharing that, Ted. Now we know whom to blame…

Flashback, June 1781: “Other Midnight Ride” Saves Jefferson

In her cockamamie way, Sarah Palin’s recent visit to Boston has reminded Americans again about how Paul Revere’s ride serves as our eternal symbol of patriotic vigilance. The Beantown jack-of-all-trades got lucky in the afterlife in being lionized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (though I imagine he’s turning over in his grave, angry and thoroughly confused, at the thought that a contemporary politician believed he “warned the British” about their own plans).

To my knowledge, no versifier of similar renown has performed such magic for Jack Jouett Jr. But without the all-night ride, completed June 4, 1781, of this Virginian, not only might Thomas Jefferson have been executed, but the American Revolution as a whole might have been snuffed out with Britain’s capture of members of the government of the large, strategically important state of Virginia.

For the rest of Jefferson’s life, opponents would charge that Jouett’s arduous and brave ride would not have been necessary at all if the Sage of Monticello had adequately performed his duties as governor of Virginia. As with so many politically inspired charges down to this very day, this aspersion on Jefferson’s record blended manifest unfairness with at least some amount of truth.

In my American Presidency seminar in college, our professor tossed out the possibility of one theme for the semester: the performance of those Presidents who served as governors before they reached the White House. Their triumphs and disasters in state capitals, he thought, often foreshadowed how they performed as President.

That observation was especially true of Jefferson’s two years as governor of Virginia. The best way to gauge what he thought of it can be glimpsed by observing the three achievements mentioned on his tombstone at Monticello: “author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia."

Those three items are primarily intellectual, not political, achievements. Nowhere does Jefferson mention that he had gained the highest office in both his state and nation. No wonder: In both cases, he left office profoundly depressed, with his achievements called into question by near-disasters that were at least partly of his own making.

Jefferson had just finished his second one-year term as governor the day before Jouett, a resident of Charlottesville, took off to warn him that the British were on their way to capture him. Jefferson couldn’t have been happier to relinquish his post: Virginia, suspicious of executive power, had not only vested its governor with no independent veto power, no appointive power, no power to call out the militia, but had left him bound by the decisions of an eight-man Council of State elected by the Assembly.

At key moments in the developing military crisis of early 1781, the Council of State hamstrung Jefferson, being unable several times to meet a quorum and, in one instance, rejecting his plea to create a standing Virginia army. However, in several ways, Jefferson made critical errors of his own in dealing with British invaders into Virginia’s heartland:

* he had ignored intelligence, in September and December 1780, from both Generals Horatio Gates and George Washington, that the British were planning assaults southward from New York or, more specifically, directly at Portsmouth;
* he had dispatched as many troops from the state as he could to assist George Rogers Clark on his military mission into present-day Ohio, Indiana and Illinois—giving later American negotiators in Paris an invaluable assist in claiming this as American territory, but in the meantime leaving Viriginia's coastal defenses badly undermanned;
* he had waited two days after learning that unknown ships had landed in the Chesapeake before calling out the militia or requesting an emergency meeting of the Council of State.

One element in particular made Jefferson’s two terms as governor an unfortunate dress rehearsal for his two terms as President: a ghastly underestimation of the value of naval power. After six weeks in office, he had concluded that “we should be gainers were we to burn our whole navy.” Thirty years later, as the War of 1812 was just about to ensue, the ex-President advised one confidante that seizing Canada would be “a mere matter of marching,” and his belief that small coastal gunboats instead of frigates would be sufficient to defend the country proved a dismal failure when the British came ashore and burned Washington.

It’s hard to know how Jefferson, who implemented so many ingenious schemes around Monticello, could be so impractical about defense matters. Perhaps it was a byproduct of a visionary nature that could see so much in the distance but so little in front of his own nose. (Of the three Virginian Democratic-Republicans, it was James Monroe, the one judged blessed with the smallest amount of intellect, who had the best grasp of military matters—but that might have resulted from his three years he spent in the Continental Army—three years more than Jefferson and Madison spent combined.)

The result, in the first half of 1781, was a pair of near-catastrophes at the hands of two of the British army’s most despised officers. In early January, Jefferson and the legislature had to flee Richmond (a site chosen as state capital because, ironically, it would be easier to defend that Williamsburg, located closer to the coast) to avoid capture at the hands of Benedict Arnold. Then in early June, Col. Banastre Tarleton made a dash toward Charlottesville to capture the assembly, which were planning to reconvene there following Arnold’s raid on Richmond.

Several prominent patriots—including Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee in town and Jefferson in Monticello—were within the reach of the man that the patriots had taken to calling “Bloody Ban” for what they saw as his war crimes. In his characteristic vigorous fashion, Tarleton had covered tremendous ground in bringing his troops to this point.

Tarleton had stopped his men to rest on June 3 at a tavern when Jouett overheard their plans. As inconspicuously as he could, the 26-year-old Charlottesville resident—a bear of a man—dashed out of the Cuckoo Tavern and made his extraordinary ride to Charlottesville.

Though Jouett’s adventures over the next 24 hours are unsung nowadays, his ride was more astounding than Revere’s:

* Revere’s ride to Concord was only 15 miles; Jouett’s was more than 40;
* Revere had the help of two other riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, the last of whom actually completed the ride to Concord; Jouett made the trip entirely by himself.
* Jouett, to escape British detection, rode virtually the entire way on backroads, through vines, brambles, and potholes.

Jouett reached Jefferson by 4:30 in the morning. The latter is said to have coolly offered the rider some of his choice Madeira to fortify him for the last leg of his trip to Charlottesville to warn members of the assembly gathered there to leave.

You can only imagine how Jefferson must have felt when he heard this latest bit of news from Jouett: anxiety for his household, relief that he’d be able to make his getaway just in time, but also a feeling something like that great line from Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell is this?” His wife Martha had just experienced another difficult pregnancy, and she was showing less resiliency than before. (She would, in fact, die a year later, leaving her husband so disconsolate that he refused to leave his room for three weeks.)

Now Jefferson had to deal with a government that he technically no longer headed but whose successor was weeks away from taking office, as well as a household on the brink of danger. (Some historians have argued that, contrary to his reputation as “Bloody Ban,” Tarleton had given strict orders that private property would not be harmed. But even if that were true, the British would still be practicing a kind of predecessor of the neutron bomb: i.e., minimizing property damage while maximizing the pain felt by people. Thus, having put his signature to the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson would be on the short list of politicians measured by the British for the noose if captured.)

After sending his wife and family to safety at a friend’s home, Jefferson rode off, leaving the estate in the care of two slaves, Martin Hemings and Caesar. From the stories passed down over the years, the slaves suffered more at the hands of the British than their master did. When the first British horseman rode up to Monticello, Hemings slammed down the floorboard of the east portico on poor Caesar, who was hiding the silver plates there. For the next three days, Caesar was trapped under the porch until the redcoats departed. Martin, if the family legend is true, had an even closer call, refusing to divulge Jefferson’ s whereabouts to the redcoats despite a gun pressed against his chest.

What Jefferson faced next was not musket fire from redcoats, but potshots from his countrymen. His conduct during the defense of Richmond had disgusted the Continental Army’s General von Steuben, and now his conduct during Tarleton’s raid led to charges of cowardice. A few days after the enemy had departed, the legislature took up the issue. An impassioned defense by Jefferson led the legislators not only to withdraw the charges, but to thank him for his “impartial, upright, and attentive administration, whilst in office.”

Nevertheless, Jefferson could not embrace private life readily enough after that. That same attitude would be repeated in March 1809, after the Embargo Act--passed by his administration to punish Britain for its impressment of their former sailors on American ships—only ended up devastating American shipping, and plunging his own popularity to its great depth during his eight years as President. Now on the brink of retiring, he couldn’t wait once again to stop sailing on “the boisterous ocean of political passions.”

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Injustice vs. Optimism)

“I respect man for what he has to go through in life, and sometimes for how he does it, but he has changed little since he began to pretend he was civilized, and the same thing may be said about our society. That is how I feel, but having made that confession let me say, as you may have guessed, that I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small thing to offer.”—Investigative Magistrate B.I. Bibikov to prisoner Yakov Bok, in Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1966)

Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer influenced me as much as any novel I read in high school—both for its unobtrusive but effective style and its message about the indomitable spirit of the individual, even in the face of crushing injustice and circumstance. Many times, when I feel things are hopeless, I especially recall the above quote. It has, in a way, became a kind of personal credo, like the W.E. Henley poem "Invictus."

Malamud passed away writing at his desk 25 years ago on this date, only a day after telling editor and friend Robert Giroux that he expected to finish the last four chapters of his latest novel, The People, by the fall. It was an unjust twist of fate that he wasn’t able to complete it, but nothing like what befall his hero Yakov Bok in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

The most unlikely of heroes, Bok leaves his village for Kiev in 1911 to make a better life for himself as a handyman. Instead, he finds that, even though he is a nonobservant Jew, he is accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child, in a Czarist Russia rocked by periodic pogroms over the age-old "blood libel" canard.

(Several weeks ago, Sarah Palin plunged into controversy by using the term “blood libel” to describe how liberals had tarred her with the extremism associated with the shooting of Rep.Gabrielle Giffords. Before she appears again on Fox News, she might want to read The Fixer before asking herself if her case even remotely compares to the one in this book—a situation based on an all-too-common reality of early 20th-century Europe, such as the real-life case of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Ukranian Jew whose sensational trial inspired Malamud's treatment here.)

In the scene from which the above quote is taken, a window of hope is opened for Bok, only to be cruelly closed again. He’s finally found, in Bibikov, the closest thing to decency among those examining his case—true, a man who’ll urge Bok’s prosecution for the “crime” of living in an area forbidden to Jews, but at least determined to drop the far more serious murder charge. "If the law does not protect you, it will not, in the end, protect me," Bibikov notes.

Almost immediately, that remark becomes unexpectedly true, as Bibikov is murdered. His death only adds to a string of troubles that make Bok a modern-day Job.

But, against all odds, the “fixer”—a proverbial “little man” standing against a giant, monstrous legal system—endures. By at least surviving until his trial, he stands a chance of disproving the murderous falsehood that would doom not only himself but all Jews.

What helps him go on? Who is to say that it isn’t the words of the proto-existentialist Bibikov, urging, decades before Camus, the necessity of action even when all seems hopeless?

For all their differences in station and outlook, Bibikov and Bok end up sharing something: an ability to transcend former beliefs and circumstances by committing, come what may, to doing the right thing. Bibikov, a bureaucrat in the service of an absolutist ruler, realizes that twisting the law will destroy his country as surely as any prisoner. And Bok, early on a self-described nonreligious, nonpolitical Jew, is fortified on the last page by this hard-earned understanding: “One thing I've learned, ...there's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.”

How did I, a parochial school student, come to empathize so powerfully with a victim of anti-Semitism? It might derive from a statement Malamud made late in life: “All men are Jews, except that they don’t know it.” At one and the same time, Malamud depicts both the particular details of the lives that made Jews the scapegoats of the 20th century and the universal instincts that made them irrevocably a part of humanity.

In his first published novel, The Natural (1952), Malamud invoked the mythic overtones associated with baseball, only, in the end, to debunk them. But in The Fixer, he endowed a common man with an almost mythic heroism.

At the height of his career, Malamud ranked with his contemporary Saul Bellow and younger colleague Philip Roth in a kind of triumvirate of great Jewish-American writers. In the quarter-century after his death, while their reputation stands high or has even risen, his stock has mysteriously declined. The Fixer demonstrates why a long-overdue reassessment to restore him to his rightful honored place in American letters is in order.

TV Quote of the Day (Jimmy Fallon, on Obama and Palin)

“President Obama is back from Hawaii. And he says he read three books while he was on vacation, or as Sarah Palin put it, ‘showoff.’”—“Laugh Lines,” The New York Times, January 9, 2011

Quote of the Day (Sarah Palin, Showing Skill With English)

“Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.”—Sarah Palin, Twitter post July 18, 2010, quoted in “Sarah Palin Calls on 'Peaceful Muslims' to 'Refudiate' Their Own Religion,” "Little Green Footballs" blog, July 18, 2010

For a long time, I’ve felt, after watching thank-yous at the Oscars, that actors should not be allowed anywhere near a computer because of the damage they might do to the English language. Now comes Sarah Palin, making me wonder if the same restriction should apply to politicians.

In his great essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell noted that “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” I suppose that Sassy Sarah’s tweet—calling on the abandonment of the mosque near the World Trade Center, in a country dedicated to freedom of religion—constitutes that.

But most of all, I think Orwell would break out in bitter laughter, not just at this tweet—which, Palin might have argued, was simply a typo—but by its follow-up correction, which called on “Peaceful New Yorkers” to “refute” the plan. It somehow escaped the former Vice-Presidential candidate's notice that the verb was still incorrect.

Someone wasn’t paying attention in English class in some Alaskan high school 30 years ago…

Quote of the Day (David Letterman, With a Belated Apology)

"I would like to apologize especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the Governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke. I'm sorry about it and I'll try to do better in the future."—David Letterman, Late Night With David Letterman, apologizing for his joke about a daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin being “knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez on a visit to Yankee Stadium

I had been gathering my thoughts about the Letterman-Palin spitting match, only to be diverted by other subject matter (and some events unrelated to the writing of this blog) over the last week. Over the last couple of days, I wondered about just shelving the whole thing, thinking the matter was passé.

Ultimately, I thought better of it, for two reasons:

1) I had so much written already, so why discard it?

2) Even when she does nothing remotely newsworthy or even interesting, Gov. Palin possesses some mysterious quality that makes otherwise allegedly normal people—not just erstwhile aging GOP Presidential candidates but also current but aging talk-show hosts—lose their minds.

Given the distractions Palin caused his campaign, John McCain is probably wondering these days if her star quality and the precedent he set in choosing her was really worth the candle. Similarly, Letterman might be wondering if the chance to score a few cheap laughs at her expense was really worth a situation that scared the network suits and forced him to make an unusual and very public apology.

Nobody with any sense other than historians, I thought, would take any notice of Palin for, oh, at least another year and a half. Actually, I was praying that nobody would take notice of her. With an economy still taking on water, with the Middle East a mess and with North Korea bellowing at Japan and the U.S. and anyone else it has a mind to, the least I need is braying from another Presidential hopeful.

But damn if John Kerry didn’t go and put Palin in the spotlight again! (What was I saying about “erstwhile aging GOP Presidential candidates” just before?)

In the middle of last week, as speculation began to swell on where in the world was Mark Sanford, the junior Senator from Massachusetts said at a party gathering, "Too bad if a governor had to go missing, it couldn't have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin."

There were some guffaws reported at the event, but my guess is that these people must have been paid to do so. Otherwise, the remark offers ample evidence why a couple of years ago, after another gaffe (about the educational level of armed-forces enlistees) slipped from his lips, Democratic primary support went “missing” for its 2004 standard bearer. You know, John Kerry.

Leave aside the dubious humor of wishing someone could disappear. There’s that tone, the sense that Lord Kerry, whose comically high self-regard rivals a former barfly in his state, the fictional Dr. Frasier Crane, has deigned to tell us something we don’t know after a high-profile Presidential campaign that concluded less than nine months ago: i.e., that Sarah Palin is the governor of Alaska.

There’s also the fact that at the point when Kerry made his remarks, Gov. Palin was visiting her state’s troops in Kosovo and Iraq, where her oldest son has been stationed. I imagine that if something ghastly happened while she was over there, the senator would have to harrumph and backtrack on the double.

Tone and context were also part of what tripped up Letterman, but only part. The affair represented almost a Rorschach test in our national politics.

But before we get to that, to answer some questions you might have had:

* Do I think Letterman is sexually perverted toward teenage girls, as initially implied by Gov. Palin’s spokesperson? No. Give me a break.

* Do I think Letterman was sincere in his apology? No.

* Do I think Letterman is blameless in this whole thing? No.

It was fascinating to watch the sides line up on this issue. The more likely you were to be liberal or to love Letterman, the more likely you were to believe that Sarah Palin was, as one respondent put it on one Web site I saw, a “media whore.” The more likely you were to be conservative or to love Letterman’s former late night rival, Jay Leno, the more likely you were to want Letterman picketed, pickled, boiled, roasted on a pit, then fired.

I have a somewhat different perspective. I’ve never felt undying allegiance to Letterman or Leno, and though I’ve never voted Republican in a Presidential election, I’ve split my votes among Democrats, Republicans and independents in other races over the years.

If you want to characterize me, call me a contrarian, someone constitutionally averse to sticking with one set of people whose positions, through mutual reinforcement, will only calcify over time.

I don’t expect to vote for Palin for President if she runs in 2012. Her positions on the environment, energy and guns would, by themselves, lose my vote, but her resume is, to put it mildly, thin.

Letterman said he didn’t intend 14-year-old Willow, but instead her 18-year-old sister, the famously unwed mom Bristol, to be the target of his joke. I have no reason to dispute his defense that he’d never joke about a 14-year-old and statutory rape, and I think Palin was merely making political hay when she said she didn’t believe him.

Anyone who has ever put his words out for examination, either orally or in print, is bound to sympathize with the “Late Night” host’s bewilderment that the perception of his remark did not match his intentions. Which of us hasn’t said or thought, “Why don’t you understand what I’m trying to say?”

But none of this, in the end, constitutes a get-out-of-jail card for Letterman. This was not a joke wrenched out of context. Letterman is clearly nonplussed why so many people—not just conservatives, as you’d expect, but even the otherwise progressive National Organization for Women--were bothered by this.

So let me boil it down for him in a way that he—and other comics—should grasp:

Say what you want about politicians and officeholders. But if their kids are underage, spare us—and them—your barbs. They didn’t ask for it by entering public life. Just leave them alone.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan seems perhaps even more bothered than Letterman by all the fuss. Why shouldn’t people go after politicians’ families, he believes, since candidates put them on display for the voters?

Politicians, narcissists that they are, should understand that they enter the political arena at their own risk. And unlike shy, retiring Rachel Jackson or Mamie Eisenhower, today’s Presidential spouses are not just adults but, post-women’s-lib, active participants and public partners in their husbands’ campaigns.

But candidates' kids didn’t ask their parents to go for the grand prize. They have become collateral damage in partisan attempts to get at their parents.

It’s all part of the widening nastiness of politics over the last two decades. When he made fun of Chelsea Clinton’s looks on the air 15 years ago, Rush Limbaugh did nothing except expose his own cruelty. I was disgusted then, just as I am angered now at the treatment of Bristol and Willow.

Don’t get me wrong: after you pass 21, you’re pretty much on your own as far as your choices are concerned. If you’re one of Franklin Roosevelt’s sons, using your father’s name and power to get by, or Neil Bush, involving himself in a savings-and-loan just when this financial scandal became a big thing in his father’s administration—well, good luck.

But younger kids are different. Adolescence is about experimenting, stepping gingerly into a self you may not know yet. You’re not always going to make the right move.

If you’re a baby boomer, you’re likely to know of someone who’s made a fool out of themselves at least once with alcohol or other drugs during their teens. You might know someone, like Bristol Palin, in a crisis pregnancy. Heck, it might even have happened to you.

But chances are, you didn’t end up on the front pages of newspapers, on CNN or hundreds of blogs over it. Nobody is interested in it. Nobody should be, even if their parent is a politician.

A useful yardstick for assessing how to treat the erring children of politicians is Al Gore III. Two years ago, he was arrested for possession of drugs while he was driving. Since he was 24, that treatment was appropriate.

But while his father was Vice-President, when he was 13 and at the DC prep school St. Alban’s, the younger Gore was caught by school authorities with some mind-altering substances. The matter was publicized in the U.K., but not here in the U.S., because Gore made a personal appeal to journalists, many of whom had teenage kids at St. Alban’s and similar exclusive prep schools: What if it happened to your kid?

The reporters saw his point and almost universally sat on the story. I think they were right to do so. Kids should not be defined in the public eye at such a young age by a mistake, or even by a few of them.

I wish reporters—and comedians—would act with similar restraint today. Even if Letterman was correct that he went so far as to verify Bristol Palin’s age before ridiculing her (17 at the time of her pregnancy), he still would have been wrong to do so. The fact that so many other comedians besides him had already done so was no excuse.

I think Letterman’s joke boomeranged on him, in a way it might not have under other circumstances, because of:

* The sheer mass of his jokes about her. Evidently, over the last year, his number of jokes about Palin outnumbered those by Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jon Stewart—none of them, be it said, disinclined to go easy on the governor—combined. Letterman had laid the foundation for a perception that he had something of a vendetta against her.

* The “Top 10 Highlights Of Sarah Palin's Trip To New York”. Some of the other remarks about Palin that night by themselves reeked with vehemence.

For instance, #9: “Laughed at all those crazy-looking foreigners entering the U.N.” A suggestion of zenophobia, perhaps?

Or #3: “Finally met one of those Jewish people Mel Gibson's always talking about .” Hmmm…anti-Semitism? If that was not what that one was about, what exactly was he hinting at?

Or #2: “Bought makeup from Bloomingdale's to update her ‘slutty flight attendant’ look.” Since when are flight attendants “slutty”? Since when is Palin? Since when has any major female candidate in memory been labeled “slutty,” aside from this instance?

It took a lot longer for Letterman to apologize to the Palins than he did when he made Paris Hilton cry a year and a half ago for her stint in the slammer. There’s a problem there.

I think Letterman will come back from this misstep, but it will take him longer to recover than he did from his disastrous appearance hosting the Academy Awards in the 1990s.

Last fall, Wall Street Journal media critic Dorothy Rabinowitz speculated that Letterman’s on-air fury over being ditched by John McCain was reminiscent of Arthur Godfrey’s exposure as a crank when he went after Julius LaRosa in the 1950s. The Sarah Palin incident makes that observation look especially prescient now.

It would be a shame if this highly talented comedian became defined by a mistake. But that was the same treatment he accorded Bristol Palin. He was certainly right, after Palin initially protested, that his joke was in "poor taste." He was also right to accept his mother's advice and apologize to the Palins. Let's hope that, like Bristol Palin, he'll make an effort to learn from his mistake.